


Devils Have Wings

by Kazymyr



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Angst, Dark, Drug Use, Heartache, Hurt, M/M, POV Second Person, Sorry Not Sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-07
Updated: 2016-01-07
Packaged: 2018-05-12 07:38:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,466
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5658082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kazymyr/pseuds/Kazymyr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is how bad ideas start. They start with the best intentions and then they end up with shattered hearts and dirt on your knees. You think you’re better than all of these things, you know better, you’re smarter than that, but then you’re not and you see him and you’re convinced your entire existence has led to this moment and all the things you thought you had been looking for were actually him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Devils Have Wings

There were a lot of things your mother warned you about. She warned you to always think before you spoke, to wash your hands before every meal, and to beware of the devils that walked among you. She said they would be everywhere if you weren’t careful; they gripped their claws around unsuspecting hearts and tore them to pieces if you weren’t looking for them. She said that sometimes they would be hard to recognize, they came in all shapes and sizes and if you ever ran into one you couldn’t really be to blame, but you had to be careful.

She said: “ _You have to be careful of the devils, Will. People like you and I… we always seem to fall in love with them._ ” 

And up until two days ago, you waved her off as a little crazy and a lot overbearing, but now you understood what she was trying to tell you when you were too young to listen.

Forty-eight hours earlier, your co-workers, your boss, the women at the front desk, they all shoved you out the doors and said you needed to take a break. You were too emotionally invested. Your eyes were too sunk and your skin was too thin. They said: _“Go and live a little_ ” and you’re not sure this is what they meant, but it sort of explains how you ended up in the middle of the desert, accidently covered in glitter, along with thousands of other people who were moving along to songs you’ve never heard before.

This is not your scene. This is not like any place you’ve ever been, and the health care provider in you is shaking because there are definitely some questionable substances and you are pretty sure someone to your left is having a seizure (but the crowd, it moves, and one moment you see them and one moment you don’t).

You stick out like a sore thumb but no one is telling you to leave so you think maybe if you stay long enough, you’ll start to feel like you’re a part of something.

(At the very least you think you’ll get a contact high and forget what it feels like to be you.)

This is how bad ideas start. They start with the best intentions and then they end up with shattered hearts and dirt on your knees. You think you’re better than all of these things, you know better, you’re smarter than that, but then you’re not and you see _him_ and you’re convinced your entire existence has led to this moment and all the things you thought you had been looking for were actually him.

He’s dark and he’s far away. You want to say he’s beautiful but you can’t because that word is too soft for what he is. He makes you heart forget that it should only beat once (not twice at the same time) and when he sees you and smiles, it makes you feel afraid, like you know that this is dangerous and you know the dirt is already creeping onto your skin. You wonder if maybe there is still time for you to get away with all your pieces intact, but the world has other ideas and there isn’t a point in fighting.

He sees you, just like you see him. He’s smiling and your head is shouting: “ _Get out_ ” but instead he’s suddenly very close and you’re telling him your name without him asking. He tells you his and you repeat it over and over because it feels strange and tastes velvety on your tongue.

_Nico. Nico. Nico._

You have years of wisdom and a good job back home. You’ve learned most your lessons the easy way, and your mother’s warnings should lay waste to any crazy feelings you might have but now your hand is in his and you can’t say no to anything he asks you and… it feels _so good_ because this isn’t you, and not being you is so nice.

You’re a gentleman, a scholar, an overachiever but now you want to live off chemicals and anything he’s willing to give you. You’re undone by the way he says your name, how his lashes look when he’s breathing the same air you are, and how every inch of your skin itches to touch, touch, _touch_.

These are ridiculous, dangerous things, but your mind is gone and for the first time in your life your heart is screaming: “ _Listen to me! Listen to me!”_ So you do, and it ends up with your mouths so, so close.

He tells you: “ _I’m poisonous. I just need you to know.”_

And you think: _Poison me. Poison me._

For days, for weeks, you live off poison. He gets you out of the desert and out of your clothes and you share beds and you share breaths. Your heart might no longer know how to beat if he was suddenly gone and you were left to fight on your own again. He pulls you apart and then puts you back together, new and different and… you love it. You hate it. You feel untouchable and completely desperate.

_This isn’t what they meant_ ; you think late at night when you taste the venom on his skin. _They said to live a little, but maybe this is too much._

And maybe it was. Maybe this was all too much and maybe you had been searching for that devil your mother always warned you about. You just never thought his eyes would be this perfect and his body so undeniable.

You tell him secrets without him asking. You tell him everything and nothing at all, and just like every good devil, he locks it away and you know that maybe someday it will come back to hurt you. You see scars under his skin. He shows you things without meaning to and maybe it’s because of your profession, or maybe it’s because sometimes you don’t feel all that different, but you know he carries sadness somewhere way down deep, and so when he lets you, you hold him and wonder when it will all end.

(Because you know it will. Because a fire, no matter how bright, eventually turns to ash.)

You play pretend for a little longer. You run away from fate and you watch as toxins turn his fingers into claws. You love a monster and sometimes you think that makes you one as well, but he’s so sure that you’re the only thing worth saving, and you wish he understood that you felt the same. You’ve watched lives slip out of your fingertips, and for once it felt so good to have something so alive and so turbulent beneath them. Some days he says that you can’t stay with him because he’ll bring the both of you down, but you’re more afraid of living in a world without him than you are of what it would be like to see the end of the world.

The two of you bounce from place to place and you don’t know the name of where you were yesterday, but you know the sound of his voice from across a crowd. You pick him out every single time.

Some days it felt like the world bent to his wishes and everything existed only so you could be together. The world was a playground until one morning it wasn’t, and the bed you’re lying in is empty and every trace of him is missing.

And it’s hard to admit, but you’re not really all that surprised.

All his two or three things are gone and his absence is suffocating. It’s all stopped; the end of your story, except for the little folded paper that is lying where his head should have been and all you can think is that this is how you die.

For the record, you don’t read it. You leave it behind because you know it says something about ruining something beautiful, and he’s right but wrong. You feel perfectly, thoroughly ruined, but you don’t feel beautiful at all.

It takes you a while before you can get back on to your feet. You mean this in every sort of sense because since he left, it’s hard for you to even stand up. There’s a woman next to you waiting for the bus and she is looking at you like you’re a joke and you want to tell her that you’re not an addict, you’re not a monster, you just love someone who is and you don’t usually fall when you try to stand. You don’t tell her any of these things though, so she just eyes you pitifully and when she asks what your name is you tell her: “ _Nico_ ” because it’s the only name that matters.

It takes hours and hours but you get back. You watch state lines pass by and by and your chest feels like there is nothing else. You are just pieces now. Just random organs tied together by flimsy stitches and veins that don’t remember what they do anymore. Your heart is AWOL, MIA, and it’s off somewhere in the desert, following the footsteps of a devil with dark eyes and venomous skin.

You think maybe you could have followed, but the truth is that you are no monster. Poison could only feed you for so long.

When your feet hit solid ground again you don’t go back to your apartment (there’s really no point). You might go there tomorrow but there is only one place you should go. You end up at your mother’s door and say: “ _I fell in love with a devil,”_ and there isn’t even a beat before she says: “ _we always do._ ”

And you realise she has been waiting for this exact moment your entire life.

You go back to work the following day, once you’ve showered all the dust and desert off your skin, but that doesn’t fix the things you can’t wash away. You’ve got memories and voices stuck in your head. You close your eyes and see skin and hear midnight whispers in your ear. You think: _how is it possibly to fall in love with someone like that?_

And then you think: _How is it possible not too?_

No one expects to see what they see when you walk through the doors. They think you should be refreshed, you should be better, but you’re worse for wear so they don’t say much and just leave you alone. During the day you stitch people back together, and then at night you dream of sand and dark voices, and how you had never felt more alive than when you were wrapped in cheap hotel sheets with someone who scared you.

Your days turn to weeks. Your weeks turn to months and soon all the sand is gone from your hair and you can’t remember the songs you used to listen to. You start to smile again, not quite like you did back before they sent you away but it’s something. Things aren’t what you would call _good_ , but they are, and sometimes that is good enough.

Emergencies run in and out of your care. Some nights you stay up late through the nights making sure everyone’s heart rate is all right, and other times you work through the day and watch as grown men fall to their knees pain. Every day is different, but you feel valuable because for a brief moment you knew what it was like to taste that pinnacle of life and you hope that maybe you can extend someone’s life just long enough so they can taste it as well.

A perfectly handsome gentleman asks you to coffee about three months after you woke up alone in the middle of your worst nightmare. The rational portion of your mind says yes, you should go, but the heart that had been so vocal when you met your devil was now quiet and nowhere to be found. You look your charmer in the eye and see no danger, no hurt, so you shake your head and decline because there is nothing for you here. You couldn’t even fake being in love anymore.

People are starting to think there’s something wrong with you, like maybe you think you’re playing the martyr and all you want is the wounded and the sick and not any type of genuine happiness.

But you know (of course you know) that you don’t want any of that; you just want him.

Tonight there is a little girl who asks you to marry her, and you laugh through your nose and say _: “Darling, you need to set your standards a little higher_.” She looks at you a little funny but before she can say another word there is a rush down the hall and a cluster of voices telling you another emergency is in. You know they can handle this, that there are plenty of people to help but you’ll drop by later just because you’re always a little curious. You hear: “ _overdose_ ”. You hear: “ _poor guy_ ” and you’ve heard the rest more than once so you stop listening.

That night when the hallways are quiet, you drift by and read the file on the outside of the door. You see the name _di Angelo_ printed in text and think amusingly to yourself: _“some kind of angel he is_ ” before pulling back the curtain and almost throwing up the last few remaining pieces of your heart directly onto the linoleum floor.

There were a lot of things your mother warned you about, but as it turns out, one of the things she neglected to mention was that sometimes devils can have wings as well as claws.

The Earth doesn’t still. It turns, and a lot of things happen at once. You remember every single one of the songs and how real you felt when you were dangerous and not you at all. You remember the sound of his voice against your ear in the middle of the night and without meaning to, your entire body moves closer to him like a magnet being drawn to its polar half.

Your entire existence is vibrating and this isn’t who left you alone with a note, this is something altogether different and worse.

The devil is thin now. He doesn’t look treacherous like he did when the desert lights played off his eyes. He looks clinical and sick. His eyes are too sunk and his skin is too thin, like he has been looking for something he couldn’t find. You know that feeling. You live and breathe that feeling but you can’t be here, and you certainly can’t be here right now.

He doesn’t wake up and you say a silent thank you to the gods, or God, or whoever, but then there’s a hand on your wrist in the hallway and your co-worker is asking why there was a Polaroid of the two of you in the pocket of your devil’s jeans.

And that ground, the one beneath your feet, it moves and you remember how nothing is really real when he’s nearby.

There is a lot you could tell her, but you’re sure your wide eyes say enough so you say you’re going home and that he’s fine but you can’t stay for a second longer and you need to leave and you need to leave now. Your throat feels foreign and the muscle in your chest feels strange and unpracticed, as if it wasn’t meant to fit in your body and arteries that run here and there are all too small or too big.

You block yourself into your apartment and you take deep breaths. You stay on the couch and pray that neither angels nor devils find you. You think that this can’t possibly be happening and things like these aren’t real. You find tragedy at your fingertips all the time, but he had no right to be here and there was nothing, no chance, no coincidence that should have led him back to you.

You should have never found each other in the first place.

So you hide. You barricade behind your walls, close all the blinds, and if your job was smart they would probably fire you, but they won’t, because you fix things, you heal things when you shouldn’t be able to. It makes a lot of sense that people like you would attract disease, because it’s the only thing you’ve ever been good at fixing (even if you can’t fix it in yourself).

The sun rises and sets more than once and when there is a knock on the door; it’s the loudest thing you’ve ever heard. It echoes along your floors, against your windows, and through to your ribcage, straight to your teeth. You open the door because there is no way you couldn’t and he’s standing there with wings at his back and your heart in the hands that had never been claws at all. Now, just like you had in the beginning, you understood why the heart in your chest had never felt right.

Because it wasn’t really yours.

You find your breath after months of not. A calm settles down onto your shoulders and you think maybe it was better off this way – the two of you trading hearts. Your heart could be durable and it could handle his unintentionally careless hands, but his was fragile and it belonged in your own purposeful, precise set. He looks a lot softer than when he left you, back when the chemicals were making his eyes stay lit, but now it’s all real and for the first time you look at him and you think:

_Beautiful_.

You mistook an angel for a devil. When he said he was filled with poison, you believed him, but this was no devil and the blood that ran through his veins was just as red as yours. You were made from the same material, just stitched in different, perfectly imperfect ways.

He says your name, and you fit your hand against the skin that you memorized against your best wishes.

He says: _“I wasn’t ready when I met you_ ” and you think: _me either._

He says: _“I didn’t realise what this was_ ” and you think: _I had a pretty decent idea._

He says: _“I’m not asking you to fix me_ ” and you think: _you need to do it for yourself._

_“I’m just hoping you might be here when I try_ ” and you shut the door with both of you on the same side.

There are a lot of reasons why things like these are a bad idea, but you are tired of listening to every single one of those reasons. You want to ask him why he started, why had he taken so much and why had he carried a picture of you with him wherever he went. You want to know how he ended up here and why, out of all the people who must’ve fallen in love with him, had he come back to you.

But you know. Just like you’ve always known.

_This isn’t the end,_ you think. There will be sleepless nights when the sweats are cold and when his body will shake until it can’t move. You hope that someday you’ll be able to see a different light behind his eyes that isn’t desert or poison, and you know that when the time comes, you will have to be brave as the demons come back and start ripping at his wings to reclaim him.

These are all sacrifices you’re willing to make… because it doesn’t really feel like you’re sacrificing anything at all. Someday you’re going to know what his favourite colour is, what he likes for breakfast, and the way he looks when he smiles open and honest.

And all these things? They’re so much better than anything you could possibly lose (and that includes the heart lying patiently in his hands).

There were a lot of things your mother warned you about. She warned you about devils, told you to keep the dirt off your knees and be careful with who you trusted, but she never mentioned that sometimes angels parade as devils just to see if you can still love them even as a villain. You don’t know, you’re not sure if this is a devil or an angel but you think it might not matter much because whatever he is, its part of you (and that can do a lot).

Somewhere outside the sun is still setting and the world isn’t ending. Tomorrow it will rise again and the both of you will still be there picking up the pieces the other left behind.

**Author's Note:**

> http://www.kazymyrz.tumblr.com/


End file.
